


In the Darkness (I will Meet my Creators)

by crankyrage



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Depression, M/M, Self-Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-20
Updated: 2013-11-20
Packaged: 2018-01-02 03:57:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crankyrage/pseuds/crankyrage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"...and if there are self-made purgatories, then we all have to live in them." -- Mr. Spock, "This Side of Paradise"</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Darkness (I will Meet my Creators)

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, I'd like to start off this piece with a quick warning that this piece has themes of depression, self-mutilation, suicidal language, and a suicide attempt. I don't want to ruin the piece for anyone, but this may be triggering to some, and I want to make sure I start with an explicit warning.
> 
> Thank you, and I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Title taken from Daughter's Smother
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing and mean no harm by using any real-life person or their likeness; this is simply a work of fiction for entertainment value.

His hands are shaking when he does it. It’s something he wasn’t really expecting. It’s not second-thoughts or adrenaline that’s shaking his hands back and forth to the point he has to flex all his fingers before he can continue; it’s not fear, either – it’s something – he just doesn’t know what.

But, it’s not like he cares. He hasn’t cared -- or hasn’t felt like it. He’s tried to care, but he’s just too tired. He’s too exhausted from everything.

He blinks at the blood and he thinks that he probably should be crying or disgusted or something – anything – but all he feels is relief. Relief from his mind running every minute of everyday. Relief from the feeling of total inadequacy. Relief from the game that he was constantly playing – pretending everything was okay. His veins suddenly feel icy – and after years he finally feels like he’s home.

He feels guilty, of fucking course he does. He’s not supposed to be this person. He doesn’t know how he became this person. He doesn’t want to be this person. All he wants is to escape himself – his mind – his skin.

Looking back, he doesn’t know when it all started. There wasn’t a moment he can point out that makes him think – “yeah, that was the start of everything going to shit.” It wasn’t like that.

The thing about depression is that it’s both sudden and gradual. It’s kind of like growing up – it’s happening everyday, so you don’t really realize it. Then one day you get out of bed or look in the mirror and it hits you all at once – the fear, the pain, the utter inability to be yourself – to keep living. There are days where it’s only a dull roar, a tiny voice in the back of your head, a demon easily pushed away. Others, it’s a voice screaming in your face – you can’t ignore it – it’s the only thing you can see – it starts to become you.

It’s like a dormant cancer. You’ve been living with it unbeknownst to you for months – even years. It feels normal, natural, and even status quo. But, one day you realize that it’s not normal, that a part of you is actually attacking your body and mind. Something from within is sabotaging you.

You come to the realization that your broken – irrevocably shattered – to put yourself back together seems impossible – you’ve lost the schematics – and you just don’t want to make it worse than it already is.

He’s tried to tread carefully trying not to get too high, so he’d never feel too low again. Maybe, if he doesn’t try too hard or do anything too crazy he can just live – he’d sacrifice the extreme highs if he never had to feel the extreme lows.

He’s tried to turn away, keep his head down, and muddle through. That’s who he’s become. 

 

He stopped living his life; it was like he started watching some other version of himself live – like he was just a spectator watching the months and years go by. Everything became so blurred by the apathy and the pain – the sinking feeling that fills his body up – everything became blank and empty.

He would wake up and feel like something was literally sitting on his chest, squeezing the air slowly out of his lungs. It wasn’t enough to kill him, but just enough to have the constant reminder that something was broken. He was broken.

Depression isn’t about life – it isn’t even about the pain. It’s about the absence of emotion. It’s about emptiness, loneliness, and feeling like nothing will ever bring you pain or joy again. You can’t feel. The thing is, you’re not living. You are just existing. In normal life pain, excitement, sadness, sorrow, and pleasure all have their time and place – sometimes life causes pain. But, depression, it’s the absence of these feelings – it’s about being numb – like you’re not even living. The pain you feel during depression – it comes in weird spurts at never the right time – it’s just there to fill the space where emotion used to live – in place of what you should be feeling. Suddenly, you’re sobbing on the bathroom floor when you get a hangnail, or laughing when everything around you is crumbling. Nothing fits – like suddenly, you’re a square peg and your life is a circle hole.

In a way, he kept kind of hoping things would start to go really badly in his life – like if somehow if his circumstances matched his pain on the inside, it would make the suffering worth it or something. He was destructive. He wanted to – He don’t even know what he wanted – he just didn’t want to feel that way anymore. He wanted relief from his mind. He wanted an escape. He wanted to jump out of his own skin – out of his own mind.

His life became an elaborate game of pretending – trying to force himself to be normal again – act like everything was fine. He wasn’t and isn’t fine.

The guilt began to eat away at him. He had no right to feel any of the things he felt – the helplessness, the loneliness. He had everything he wanted. He had accomplished things professionally that he could have only dreamt – first overall draft picker, Calder Trophy winner, Olympic Silver medalist, and Stanley Cup champion. He had a family that believed in him and loved him no matter what. He had great teammates and friends that always had his back even when he did the most ridiculous things. He had a great guy, who despite everything loved him unconditionally. 

He didn’t deserve any of it – not with the way he felt every day. 

Depression is a constant rut. You try to smile – you try to laugh – you try to literally do anything and everything to wake yourself up– make yourself feel something. But, it feels like you just physically cannot. You wake up and try to be yourself, do the things you love, be the person you know you are inside, and you just can’t – like there is some physical force literally holding you back – there’s nothing anyone can do to make it better.

He doesn’t want to die – it may seem counterintuitive – but he doesn’t. He just can’t live like this anymore. He’s afraid. He’s terrified of himself. He’s terrified of his own thoughts and actions. He’s terrified of the things that he knows that he’s capable of. He’s afraid to feel. He’s afraid to live. So, he doesn’t want to die. He just cannot bear to live.

He can kind of equate to drowning. You’re going down – sinking deeper and deeper. At first you fight – you kick and scream and try to battle to the top. The water starts to fill your lungs – at first it burns, then it’s painful and everything starts to fade together, and it starts become harder and harder to fight. Pretty soon, it’s like you’re watching yourself lose everything. You’ve almost accepted that nothing can be done.

In a lot of ways, he was kind of waiting for himself to reach this threshold of self-destruction. He was kind of just waiting for himself to go too far. He was waiting to cross this threshold – to just let everything just get away from him. He was waiting to destroy himself. But, it never happened. He was destructive in all these ways – but it was never enough – it didn’t come close to matching the pain he felt inside.

He started pushing everyone close to him away – because he didn’t deserve any of them. He didn’t deserve his wonderful parents and grandparents who gave up so much just so he could have the smallest shot at his dream. He definitely didn’t deserve his sisters who, despite all their sassy bullshit, would literally do anything just to make him smile. He didn’t deserve his teammates – his successes – his anything.

So, he pushed and pushed and pushed everyone way, all while trying to keep together this façade that everyone was okay. It was as if he pretended long enough his life would snap back into focus or something.

But, nothing good was coming into his life. He was crippled and tried and defeated. It just kept snowballing and snowballing until Jonny would scream and scream red faced and angry at him to get his fucking shit together – “wake up, Patrick!” “be an adult, Patrick.” But, he couldn’t. He couldn’t even breathe without it feeling secondary.

Madison had been the final straw – the final notice that nothing was going to wake him from his coma. It had been his one last ditch effort to try to make something in his life function again – to make himself feel something – to push him over the edge – to make himself swim for survival.

But, just as he did in the years past, he just realized that he couldn’t swim. He was drowning, and there was no one to save him.

So, his hands are shaking while he does it. He is a little surprised, but he isn’t put off by it. He knows this is the only way to escape – the only way to finally be at peace.

He stares at the blood as it trickles down his arms and thinks about the relief – the finality of it. 

If he were a better person, he’d be thinking about his parent’s reactions.

If he were a better person, he’d be thinking of what this was going to do to sisters. 

If he were a better person, he’d be thinking about the PR shitstorm everyone in the Blackhawks organization is going to be facing.

If he were a better person, he’d be thinking about Sharpy having to explain to Maddy why Uncle Kaner was never coming to play with her again.

If he were a better person, he’d be thinking about Jonny coming to terms with the one person he finally let himself love, not loving himself.

But, in this moment, he’s not concerned about being a good person. He’s not concerned with doing right by anyone else. He’s finally taking everything he’s felt in the past few years into his own hands – he’s finally doing something to escape. 

He begins to float and can feel himself begin to slip from consciousness and he smiles because he’s finally getting what he wanted – what he needed.

He doesn’t hear Duncs and Seabs come into his apartment.

He doesn’t hear Seabs start screaming, “He’s dead! He’s dead!” over and over until he can’t breathe and his voice is hoarse.

He doesn’t hear the sirens and the shouting and the commotion of the paramedics. 

He doesn’t see the panic on Sharpy’s face when the call wakes him up in the middle of the night.

He doesn’t see the pictures of Sharpy crying in the Thunder Bay Airport at four in the morning that same night.

He doesn’t hear Erica scream so loud when she gets the call that she wakes up three of her neighbors.

He doesn’t see Duncs, Seabs, and Sharpy huddled together in the ICU waiting room trying to keep it together.

He doesn’t see Jonny run out of their apartment catching a cab to the hospital with no shoes on.

He doesn’t see him sit next to Seabs in the waiting room, biting his lip so hard that it bleeds to keep himself from losing it.

He doesn’t see him break down, folding himself into Seabs’ shoulder, and crying until he literally cries himself to sleep, barefeet against the linoleum floor.

He doesn’t see the scene Jonny makes in the hospital screaming at the nurses and doctors and anyone that will listen that they’re family – they’re everything to each other – that Jonny needs to seem him – should be allowed to.

He doesn’t see the crushing embrace Erica, Jackie, and Jess give Jonny when they meet up at the hospital, and he definitely doesn’t see them all sit together in a heap and cry until they can’t cry anymore.

He doesn’t know that Jonny blames himself for missing the signs – for missing the fact that the most important person in his life hated himself so much. He blames himself for not being there for Patrick. He blames himself for not being able to pull Patrick out of his depression. He blames himself for not understanding why Patrick did it. He blames himself for nearly everything.

He doesn’t see Jonny self-destruct – drink and smoke and cry and shatter his framed Stanley Cup jersey for what it represents – the lie Patrick was telling everyone.

He does feel Jonny’s hand in his own as he comes to – his hands running over Patrick’s bandaged arms. He feels his lips on his forehead and hears his stupid monotone droning on to Patrick nonsensically in French.

He sees Jonny blink back tears when he cracks open his eyes and they lock their gazes.

He feels the heat of Johnny’s chapped lips as he crashes them into Pat’s murmuring, ”I love you,” and “never do that again” over and over until it sounds like a hilariously-bad pop song.

He sees the pain in Jonny’s eyes when he pulls his hand away from his grasp as harshly as he can muster and squeezes his eyes shut – so angry that he cannot even manage to kill himself.

He’s such a failure; he can’t even manage to end everything himself.

He starts to cry red-hot angry tears and when he finally has a voice he yells and yells and yells because nothing is fair. He just wants to escape.

He hears himself screaming – yelling – trying to make Jonny understand that this isn’t what he wanted. He’s not meant to be here. He’s not meant to live.

He finally cannot yell anymore – cannot look his family in the eye – and settles back into his own self-made purgatory.

**Author's Note:**

> There you have it. For some clarification, this work does not represent a personal take on depression and suicide. It does not represent my personal feelings on the topic, it is simply a work trying to capture the vulnerability and the slippery slope that depression can cause -- the fallacies in thinking it can create. I am not in any way trying to color anyone's experience or say anything explicit on the topic. 
> 
> I've also written a few other things in this universe but am pretty apprehensive about posting them; this obviously is a sensitive topic, and I don't want anyone to feel alienated or put off. But, if you'd like to see those, leave me a comment -- or if you have suggestions!
> 
> Also, this takes place in the summer of 2012.
> 
> Getting that out of the way, I hope you enjoyed the piece. As always, your feedback is appreciated!


End file.
